Defining Historical Baselines for Conservation: Ecological Changes Since European Settlement on Vancouver Island, Canada
Anne D. Bjorkman, Mark Vellend (2010) Defining Historical Baselines for Conservation: Ecological Changes Since European Settlement on Vancouver Island, Canada. Conservation Biology, Volume 24, Issue 6, pages 1559–1568, December 2010
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Abstract
Conservation and restoration goals are often defined by historical baseline conditions that occurred prior to a particular period of human disturbance, such as European settlement in North America. Nevertheless, if ecosystems were heavily influenced by native peoples prior to European settlement, conservation efforts may require active management rather than simple removal of or reductions in recent forms of disturbance. We used pre-European settlement land survey records (1859–1874) and contemporary vegetation surveys to assess changes over the past 150 years in tree species and habitat composition, forest density, and tree size structure on southern Vancouver Island and Saltspring Island, British Columbia, Canada. Several lines of evidence support the hypothesis that frequent historical burning by native peoples, and subsequent fire suppression, have played dominant roles in shaping this landscape. First, the relative frequency of fire-sensitive species (e.g., cedar [Thuja plicata]) has increased, whereas fire-tolerant species (e.g., Douglas-fir [Pseudotsuga menziesii]) have decreased. Tree density has increased 2-fold, and the proportion of the landscape in forest has greatly increased at the expense of open habitats (plains, savannas), which today contain most of the region’s threatened species. Finally, the frequency distribution of tree size has shifted from unimodal to monotonically decreasing, which suggests removal of an important barrier to tree recruitment. In addition, although most of the open habitats are associated with Garry oak (Quercus garryana) at present, most of the open habitats prior to European settlement were associated with Douglas-fir, which suggests that the current focus on Garry oak as a flagship for the many rare species in savannas may be misguided. Overall, our results indicate that the maintenance and restoration of open habitats will require active management and that historical records can provide critical guidance to such efforts.
Introduction
In many parts of the world, conservation and restoration goals are often based on perceptions of ecosystem states prior to intense disturbance by people of European origin (Foster 2000). Although relict patches of relatively undisturbed habitat are often used in studies of the structure and functioning of past ecosytems, such areas may be exceedingly rare and remain only in a highly biased subset of environmental contexts relative to the past (e.g., Vellend et al. 2008) or they may have been influenced in important ways by human activities that are not obvious through observation of their current state (e.g., Dupouey et al. 2002). An alternative is to look directly at historical records, which can provide critical insights into former landscape conditions and processes, and reasons for subsequent changes (Foster 2000; Whitney & DeCant 2005; Rhemtulla et al. 2009).
When using past ecosystem states to define conservation goals in North America, a key debate concerns the degree to which the pre-European settlement (henceforth presettlement) landscape was shaped by natural versus anthropogenic processes (Vale 2002). The pre-1492 landscape is often thought of as a pristine wilderness, where small groups of indigenous people had little ecological impact (Stankey 1989; G´omez-Pompa & Kaus 1992). This view has strongly influenced conservation strategies (Foster 2000; Hobbs & Cramer 2008). Many of these strategies rest on the assumption that removing the human factor will restore pre-European (“natural”) conditions (Foster 2000). Other studies suggest, however, that many areas of North America were “cultural landscapes” and as such were heavily influenced by native peoples through land cultivation or prescribed fire (Denevan 1992; Vale 2002). This implies that conservation strategies may need to consider not only current human disturbances, but also the possibility of reinstating cultural practices that were historically important in maintaining ecosystems (Higgs 1997; Anderson & Barbour 2003). Natural and anthropogenic processes have always been temporally dynamic, and both factors have influenced historical vegetation composition in North America (Vale 2002). The primary issue is the scale of anthropogenic impacts: were they highly localized around areas of intense land use (e.g., settlements) or were entire landscapes fundamentally transformed (Whitlock & Knox 2002). …
The 1859 notes revealed a landscape mosaic of prairie, plains, open woods, and forest. Of the 155 historical points with habitat descriptors, more than two-thirds were described as prairie, plains or open woods, with the remainder as forest, swamp, or bottom land (Table 1). … [T]he majority of 2007 points (79%) were classified as forest and only 3% as prairies or plains (Table 1). … Even if all undescribed areas were forests, however, the proportion of the landscape in forest still roughly doubled over the past 150 years, whereas the proportion of prairies or plains declined precipitously. …
Finally, although frequent fires do not necessarily imply an anthropogenic cause, our results do indicate that the fire regime was influenced by native peoples. The observed patterns are characteristic of landscapes prone to more frequent fires than expected by lightning strikes. Experiments suggest that the unimodal tree size distribution observed on Saltspring Island occurs at a fire interval of <5 years (Fule & Covington 1994; Peterson & Reich 2001). In contrast, a study in the Douglas-fir forests of Vancouver Island estimated a fire cycle of 5700 years, on the basis of the frequency of lightning strikes between 1950 and 1992 (Pew & Larsen 2001). A more localized study of charcoal in lake sediments (Cowichan Valley), which would not have detected low-intensity grassland fires, estimated a fire-return interval of 27–41 years, although it was difficult to detect distinct fire events relative to the background level of charcoal (McCoy 2006; Pellatt et al. 2007). These results suggest fires were more frequent than expected given the natural fire-return interval and were therefore likely related to anthropogenic activity (Turner 1999; MacDougall et al. 2004). …
Conclusions
Our results have important implications for the development of a perspective on historical human impacts in the New World that is more balanced than the simple dichotomy of landscapes as either humanized or pristine (Vale 2002). Ambiguities concerning the intensity, spatial extent, and timing of anthropogenic impacts were identified by Vale (2002) as being in great need of clarification in order to reconcile opposing viewpoints. Most of our study region appears to represent an intermediate level of intensity of historical landscape modification—less intense than within the confines of a densely populated village, but of sufficient intensity to have modified vegetation structure relative to what one would expect in the absence of humans.
In terms of space, the presence of both forested and open habitats historically suggests considerable spatial variability in the magnitude of human impacts, with prescribed fire likely to have maintained at least half of the landscape as open habitat (Table 1). In terms of time, the duration of impacts has likely varied across the landscape, with sites on relatively deep soils filling in rapidly with forest and sites on shallower soils remaining as open habitats to the present day (Vellend et al. 2008). Our results support the viewpoint that for the conservation implications of historical human impacts to be fully appreciated, conservation professionals need to abandon the simple yes–no dichotomy and embrace the reality of continuous variation in the intensity, spatial extent, and duration of such impacts.
Restoration efforts are often prone to uncertainty about target conditions (Higgs 1997; Hobbs & Cramer 2008), especially in areas with no appropriate reference sites to help define historical conditions. Land managers often follow a do-nothing approach and allow land to return to its “natural” state (Hobbs & Cramer 2008). Nevertheless, our study indicates that the open nature of the endangered savannas on Vancouver Island was likely maintained by fires purposefully set by native peoples.
Thus, restoration of these habitats to their pre-European state cannot be accomplished simply by removing human influences. Achieving the goal of maintaining open savannas would almost certainly need to involve active removal of encroaching trees and shrubs, either through burning or alternative strategies (e.g., mowing, tree removal) (MacDougall et al. 2004; Gedalof et al. 2006). Ideally such measures should be implemented in controlled experiments (i.e., through adaptive management; Walters 1986). Furthermore, the tree species currently most closely associated with savannas (Garry oak) does not appear—in a historical context—to be an appropriate flagship for savannas in general or their rich diversity of associated species. This highlights the necessity of understanding
and preserving ecosystem processes, rather than patterns only, and emphasizes the need for active management to achieve conservation and restoration goals in many ecosystems.
Indigenous wetland burning: conserving natural and cultural heritage in Australia’s World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park
Sandra McGregor, Violet Lawson, Peter Christophersen, Rod Kennett, James Boyden, Peter Bayliss, Adam Liedloff, Barbie McKaige, Alan N. Andersen (2010). Indigenous wetland burning: conserving natural and cultural heritage in Australia’s World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park. Human Ecol (2010) 38:721-729
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Introduction
Growing worldwide interest in, and appreciation of, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is creating a new approach to contemporary land and sea management (Redford and Mansour 1996; Berkes et al. 2000; Huntington 2000; Schmidt and Peterson 2009). Driven by concerns about the failure of western science and management to address ecosystem degradation and species loss, people are looking to the deep ecological understandings and management practices that have guided indigenous use of natural resources for millennia for alternative ways of sustainably managing the earth’s natural resources (De Walt 1993; Bart 2006; Berkes and Davidson-Hunt 2006). Equitable partnerships between indigenous and non-indigenous researchers and managers are revealing a way of looking after the world that emphasizes human obligations to natural resource management and promotes holistic thinking about the role and impact of humans in the environment (Ross et al. 2009). This new recognition of traditional knowledge, coupled with greater control by indigenous peoples over their land and sea estates, holds great promise for better management of the world’s natural resources.
Aboriginal people have occupied northern Australia for at least 40,000 years, and over this period have developed a rich culture of law, ceremony, oral history and detailed ecological knowledge. Despite nearly two centuries of European colonization, large areas of northern Australia remain in Aboriginal ownership or have recently been returned to indigenous management and control (Ross et al. 2009). A high priority for Aboriginal people is to record and revitalize their indigenous knowledge and practices to meet stewardship obligations and to ensure they are available for younger generations of Aboriginal land and sea managers. In recent years there has also been increasing recognition by non-indigenous peoples of the value of applying such traditional ecological knowledge and practice to contemporary land management (Burbidge et al. 1988; Horstman and Wightman 2001; Walsh and Mitchell 2002).
This is particularly the case for fire management in the savanna landscapes of northern Australia, where in many areas fire management remains an integral part of Aboriginal life and traditional fire knowledge is still strong (Haynes 1985; Whitehead et al. 2003; Hill et al. 2004; Fig. 1).
The general principles behind Aboriginal burning in Australia have been well documented (Jones 1969; Nicholson 1981; Bowman 1998), and there are emerging examples in northern Australia where Aboriginal burning practices are being adopted on non-Aboriginal lands to improve environmental management (Russell-Smith et al. 2009). However there are few case studies written and informed from an Aboriginal perspective that describe in detail the specific aims and practices of Aboriginal fire management. Effective documentation is important for validating traditional ecological knowledge (Davis and Ruddle 2010), and for enabling Western land managers to appreciate both the depth of ecological understanding held by indigenous people and the complexity and effectiveness of traditional land management practices.
In this paper we provide such a case study, describing Aboriginal fire management of wetlands in the World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park. In Kakadu, traditional ecological knowledge is being used in powerful combination with Western science to manage and monitor vital cultural and natural resources, leading to a dramatic enhancement of biodiversity and cultural values, and to a deeply enriched tourist experience. We hope this paper will contribute to a greater appreciation of the importance of fire management to Aboriginal people, and a greater understanding of the complexities of managing land with fire. …
The burning of wetlands, with the seasonally shifting land and water interfaces, is a more complex procedure than burning the surrounding savanna woodlands, and the timing and extent of traditional wetland burning continue to be the focus of scientific and community debate. This scientific debate can constrain contemporary Aboriginal burning by raising doubts in the minds of Aboriginal people over whether or not they are doing the “right thing.” The knowledge we draw on and present here has been passed down from Minnie and Yorky Billy Alderson, parents to Violet Lawson, and grandparents to Sandra McGregor. Like their ancestors before them, Minnie and Yorky lived all their lives on the country, and had traditional obligations to manage it and to pass on their knowledge to the next generations. …
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A Qualitative Study with the Eastern Band of Cherokee and Southern Appalachian Community Members
Nicolette Cooley. 2004. Understanding Traditional Knowledge for Ecological Restoration: A Qualitative Study with the Eastern Band of Cherokee and Southern Appalachian Community Members. Masters Thesis, NAU School of Forestry.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Abstract
The primary objective of the research project, Understanding Traditional Knowledge for Ecological Restoration: A Qualitative Interview Study with Cherokee and Southern Appalachian Community Members, in North Carolina was to gather data concerning historical land management practices exemplified by traditional ecological knowledge and practices of the Cherokee Nation, specifically burning. This particular research project was established due to a collaborative effort between the Ecological Restoration Institute (ERI) at Northern Arizona University (NAU) and Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory in Otto, North Carolina. The study was designed to collect information about the fire history of the Southeast focusing on the region historically and currently occupied by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (E.B.C.I) within a two year time frame.
Introduction
The use of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of fire has been debated since the mid sixteenth century (Goodwin 1977) when non-Native American people viewed Indians as not being civilized enough to know the uses and effects of fire. This view brought about the belief that the Indians could not have had any significant influence on the environment (Kretch III 1999). The arrival of European explorers and settlers brought on a number of changes for the Indians and the land they occupied. Indians have brought on a number of changes for the Indians and the land they occupied. Indians have used fire to clear land for agriculture, improve visibility for hunting and traveling, and reduce the accumulation of fuels to prevent catastrophic wildfires (Noss 1983). Particularly in the Southern Appalachians Native Americans have been burning for agricultural and hunting purposes for 10,000 years (Keel 1976 in Van Lear and Waldrop 1989). Instead of acting as a destructive force, the Indians were acting as a functioning component of the ecosystem (Goodwin 1977). As a functioning component in the ecosystem, Native Americans were intentionally burning and cutting trees down because they knew burning and cutting created specific effects. For example, Goodwin describes how Indians burned forests to prevent uncontrolled fires, to clear heavy fuel loads, and undesirable weeds for cultivation. He goes on to discuss how Indians burned longleaf pine (Pinus palustrus) forests to eliminate brown-spot needle disease and competitive vegetation. Goodwin describes the importance of longleaf pine to build shelter, build canoes, and for firewood.
The Benefits of Forest Restoration
Mike Dubrasich. 2010. The Benefits of Forest Restoration. W.I.S.E. White Paper 2010-2. Western Institute for Study of the Environment.
Full text [here]
Restoration forestry aims to recover our nation’s forest heritage while also restoring the productive and harmonious relationship between people and forests that existed in historic forests. Restoration forestry is a vision for the future rooted in respect for the past. — Dr. Thomas M. Bonnicksen, Protecting Communities and Saving Forests–Solving the Wildfire Crisis Through Restoration Forestry.
FOREST restoration means active management to bring back historical cultural landscapes, historical forest development pathways, and traditional ecological stewardship to achieve historical resiliency to fire and insects and to preclude and prevent a-historical catastrophic fires that decimate and destroy myriad resource values.
Forest restoration is beneficial to man and nature in numerous ways. The following describes these benefits in general.
1. Heritage and history
To restore means to return to a former or original state. In the case of forests, restoration requires knowledge of and respect for forest history as a starting point. Forest restoration looks to pre-Contact forest conditions as a guideline.
Many (if not most) North American forests were at one time (prior to ~120 years ago) open and park-like, with widely spaced, large, old trees. Forests were conditioned to be that way by frequent, non-stand-replacing, anthropogenic fires. Historical human features included village sites; sacred and ceremonial sites; hunting, gathering, agricultural and proto-agricultural fields; extensive trail networks; prairies and savannas; and other features induced and maintained by ancient human tending through the use of traditional ecological knowledge.
Forest restoration, properly researched, designed, and implemented, restores, protects, and perpetuates many of the heritage features of forested landscapes.
Friendly Fire
Stephen J. Pyne. 2007. Friendly Fire.
Full Text [here]
Stephen J. Pyne, World’s Foremost Authority on fire and one this country’s finest writers on any subject, has done it again.
His recent essay Friendly Fire is a compelling review of the Warm WFU (Wildland Fire Use fire) and it’s effect on forests. For the entire essay download from Steve Pyne’s Commentaries site [here] (click on Friendly Fire [pdf] - Wally Covington and the 2006 Warm fire).
For background on the Warm Whoofoo see [here].
Selected excerpts from Friendly Fire by Stephen J. Pyne:
“If I were the Prince of Darkness, I could not have devised a better way to destroy the Kaibab Plateau.”
Wally Covington, professor, restoration ecologist, and a man who has been around burned woods all of his career, walked through the still-raw scar of a fire that had wiped out nine nesting reserves for the northern goshawk, shut down the only roads to the plateau, including one to Grand Canyon’s North Rim, threatened a substantial chunk of the remaining habitat of the flammulated owl and endemic Kaibab squirrel, may cause a quarter of the old-growth ponderosa pine to die, promoted gully-washing erosion, and rang up suppression costs of $7 million.
To help pay those bills the Forest Service initially proposed to salvage log some 17,000 acres of the burn, which has sparked promises of monkey-wrenching by local environmental activists. When trotted out before cameras after the blowup, the district Fire Staff Officer declared that if he knew then what he knew now, he would have made exactly the same decisions. Fire belonged on the land. This was an inevitable fire, a necessary fire, a good fire.
Wally Covington thought it testified to ideology gone mad, and had the temerity to say so and the clout to be heard.
I was there because I wanted to come home. Forty years before, in June, 1967, I had begun my own career in fire on the North Rim. Only five years previously had the opening salvo in fire’s great cultural revolution sounded. By my second summer the National Park Service had rewritten its policy to encourage more fire on its lands. I wanted to see what that revolution had wrought. …
William Wallace Covington, Regents professor at Northern Arizona University and Director of the Ecological Restoration Institute, was a child of the Sixties. Born in 1947, the middle of three sons, he was raised in Wynnewood, Oklahoma. His father, a jack-of-all-trades from prizefighter to radio announcer to barnstorming pilot, was above all an ardent woodsman, a one-time forester, who got himself and his sons where they could camp, hunt, and fish as often as possible. …
By the mid-1970s that was the collective wisdom of the day: fire had to reenter the landscape. The tricky issue was how. The National Park Service formally revised its policies in 1968. The Forest Service stepped through a sequence of half measures, allowing some wilderness fires in 1972, publicly converting in 1974 to the doctrine that fire management had to serve land management, and adopting a formal policy of fire by prescription in 1978. But ideas were easy. Implementation was tough, as both agencies struggled to make philosophy practical. The American public became rudely aware of what was happening when Yellowstone burned through the summer of 1988. Apologists cleverly framed the ensuing outcry by debating whether fire belonged in Yellowstone; that was easy, of course it did. What they avoided was the gist of the operational issue, how and at what cost and under what social compact should fire belong? Even as the NPS burned up $130-300 million (no one knows exactly how much) while failing to control the fires, the Park Service and its apologists managed to skip over the point where the philosophical rubber hit the road of real-world ecology. The agency was, it claimed, only doing what came naturally.
It was exactly this issue that the fire community has never resolved within itself. The revolution, like a bar magnet, had two poles that held the fractious particles within a common force field. The poles were bicoastal. One resided in Florida, focused on the Tall Timbers Research Station and the charismatic Ed Komarek; a sense of fire as used on private land, fire as historical and cultural, fire as a means to promote biotic assets, whether longleaf pine, bobwhite quail, or open-woods cattle. The other pole centered on the national parks of the Sierra Nevada, with its intellectual anchor in the University of California–Berkeley and its focus on public lands, and for its prophets such wildlife and rangeland professors as Starker Leopold and Harold Biswell. The Florida faction wanted fire in the hands of people; the California cohort, as far as possible, left to nature. Behind the wilderness model was the expectation that, while prescribed fire might be necessary as an expedient, the agencies would ultimately surrender their colonial oversight to the indigenous processes of nature. Prescribed fire was an expedient, to be succeeded by natural fire as possible. …
Unfortunately, putting fire back has proved more daunting than taking it out. Shortly after arriving in Flagstaff, Wally was working with Forest Service researchers keen to reinstate fire. They believed that reintroducing fire would be enough to clean out the clotted understory that choked the land like woody plaque. Plots were laid out, burned, and assessed. But everyone knew the results could only be good. After a few years, however, the field trials showed outcomes that were the exactly opposite of what had been predicted: loosed fires had killed few of the young trees without burning them up, while slow-cooking fires had girdled the bases of the old-growth ponderosa – the fabled yellow pine – two-thirds of which died over the next ten years. This was not what agencies wanted to hear. The Forest Service had just completed its painful conversion away from fire’s suppression to a doctrine of fire by prescription. Wally’s agency cooperators demanded he surrender his data on old-growth tree mortality since his work was under contract and hence the property of the Forest Service. The results, while obvious to anyone who visited the sites, were not published until 25 years later.
S. 2593 - The Forest Landscape Restoration Act of 2008
Linked below are suggested amendments to S. 2593, the Forest Landscape Restoration Act of 2008 and an explanatory letter. These documents were crafted by members of the Western Institute for Study of the Environment.
Suggested Amendments [here]
Explanatory letter [here]
The Jim’s Creek Savanna Restoration Project
Stand Diagnosis of Treatment Needs, Silvicultural Prescription, and Silvics Background Paper (Effects Analysis) — Jim’s Creek Savanna Restoration Project
by Tim Bailey, Middle Fork Ranger District, Willamette National Forest, August, 2005
Full text [here] (755KB)
Selected excerpts and some thoughts by Mike Dubrasich
Two hundred years ago the upper reaches of the Willamette River were occupied by the Molalla Indians. They may have been relative newcomers; it is conjectured that before the 1700’s the Kalapuya Indians controlled that area. In any case, evidence suggests that human beings lived in the Willamette Valley and adjacent Oregon Cascades for thousands of years.
The evidence is an oak savanna that extends deep into the mountains, including along the Middle Fork of the Willamette River above Oakridge. Today remnant old oaks, open-grown old-growth ponderosa pines, and tarweed (Madia spp) fields can still be seen, although a thicket of Douglas-fir has invaded in the last 100 years.
In 1984 an anthropologist named Carol Winkler did her Masters thesis on the ancient savannas of the Middle Fork. Later she teamed up with an intrepid USFS forester/silviculturalist named Tim Bailey, and together they resolved to restore the savanna, fields, and open pine forest of the Willamette Molallas.
In 2002 they presented a paper, Restoring the Cultural Landscape At Jim’s Creek: Challenges to Preserving a Spirit of Place, at the 55th Annual Northwest Anthropological Conference, Eugene, Oregon. April 11-13, 2002.
Testimonies to the US Senate Regarding Forest Restoration, 13 Dec 2007
Testimonies to the US Senate Energy & Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests: To receive testimony regarding forest restoration and hazardous fuels reduction efforts in the forests of Oregon and Washington (Hearing Room SD-366), Thursday, December 13, 2007.
Mark Rey - Natural Resources and the Environment: Department of Agriculture [here]
James Caswell - Director, Bureau of Land Management [here]
K Norman Johnson - University Distinguished Professor, Oregon State University, and Jerry F. Franklin - Professor of Ecosystems Sciences, College of Forest Resources, University of Washington [here]
Phil Aune - USFS (ret), former Research Program Mgr, Redding Silviculture Lab [here]
Russ Vaagen - Vice President, Vaagen Brothers Lumber Co. [here]
Matthew Donnegan - Co-President, Forest Capital Partners, LLC [here]
Russ Hoeflich - Vice President & Oregon State Director, The Nature Conservancy [here]
Boyd Britton - County Commissioner, Grant County, Oregon [here]
Michael E. Dubrasich - Executive Director Western Institute for Study of the Environment [here]
Covington Testimony July 16, 2002
Testimony of Dr. William Wallace Covington, regarding the Wildland Firefighting and National Fire Plan, before the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Chairman Bingaman, and members of the Committee, thank you for this opportunity to testify on a subject of personal importance to me and of critical importance to the health of our nation’s forests and the people and communities that live within them.
My name is Wallace Covington. I am Regents’ Professor of Forest Ecology at Northern Arizona University and Director of the Ecological Restoration Institute. I have been a professor teaching and researching fire ecology and restoration management at NAU since 1975. I chair Arizona Governor Jane Dee Hull’s Forest Health/Fire Plan Advisory Committee and am a member of the National Commission on Science for Sustainable Forestry.
I have a Ph.D. in forest ecosystem analysis from Yale University and an M.S. in ecology from the University of New Mexico. Over the past 27 years I have taught graduate and undergraduate courses in research methods, ecological restoration, ecosystem management, fire ecology and management, forest management, range management, wildlife management, watershed management, recreation management, park and wildland management, and forest operations research. I have been working in long-term research on fire ecology and management in ponderosa pine and related ecosystems since I moved to Northern Arizona University in 1975. In addition to my publications on forest restoration, I have co-authored scientific papers on a broad variety of topics in forest ecology and resource management including research on fire effects, prescribed burning, thinning, operations research, silviculture, range management, wildlife effects, multiresource management, forest health, and natural resource conservation.
My testimony will focus on the implementation of the National Fire Plan and the urgent need to increase the pace and size of forest restoration treatments to reverse the trend of increasing catastrophic wildfires. I will outline a three-step approach to help achieve this goal…
It is an unfortunate set of circumstances that have led to this hearing. Scientists have predicted the current forest crisis for the last 75 years. In 1994 I was senior author on a review paper in which I stated that we could anticipate exponential increases in the severity and extent of catastrophic fire. It is not a prediction I ever wanted to come true. In that same paper, I also suggested that we have a narrow window of 15-30 years to take preventative actions to restore forest health, minimize the loss of civilian and firefighter lives, and the mounting damage to our nation’s natural resources.
Protecting Communities And Saving Forests
Bonnicksen, Thomas M. Protecting Communities And Saving Forests–Solving the Wildfire Crisis Through Restoration Forestry. 2007. Published by the Forest Foundation [here].
Full Text and additional Restoration Forestry information [here]
Selected excerpts:
Restoration forestry is a vision for the future rooted in respect for the past. Thus, restoration forestry uses the historic forest as a model for the future forest. No scientist, forester, or environmental activist could conceive of more beautiful or diverse and sustainable forests, with more wildlife, than those found by the first European explorers. Restoration forestry aims to recover our nation’s forest heritage while also restoring the productive and harmonious relationship between people and forests that existed in historic forests.
Restoration forestry is defined as restoring ecologically and economically sustainable forests that are representative of landscapes significant in America’s history and culture. These forests also should serve society’s contemporary need for wood products and other forest values.
The goal of restoration forestry is to restore and sustain, to the extent practical, a forest to a condition that resembles, but does not attempt to duplicate, the structure and function of a reference historic forest. The term “reference historic forest” means the way a whole forest appeared spreading over a landscape, with all of its diversity, at or about the time it was first seen by European explorers.
The forests explorers found provide the most scientifically sound reference historic forest for the United States. These reference historic forests were inherently sustainable and diverse, represented thousands of years of development and human uses, existed during a period with a similar climate, and are more easily documented than forests from an earlier time.
A reference historic forest does not represent a particular point in time. It represents a period and the variations in forest structure that characterized that period. The historic period for a reference forest varies by region because the age of exploration lasted several centuries, ending in the late eighteenth century.
